> Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.
To reach elite levels you need both.
fortune favors the prepared mind
Reframing it into the active voice is a worthy goal, and this version I like better.
Joe Rogan Experience #1080 - David Goggins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY
Perhaps the ultimate iteration of "Kevin who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time."
This is "the toughest man on earth" ... legit. Highly inspirational story.
Talent measures your intuition level regarding something. So, in your example, Kevin could always reach competence, but Kevin’s afterburner capacity is set to 0% (capped). Some of us have 0-100% intuition on things, on a spectrum.
But as far as what it takes to make it in this world? Competence. Your afterburners can boost depending on it’s capacity, but you can’t run on that unless you are born with a god like afterburner tank (genius, your Einsteins). We are all limited, even the talented.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
and to keep with the other comments I would argue that some people have more taste than others, or more passion, or transferable skills that carry over, which often translates into what we think of as natural talent. But it still takes some work.
I was a very earnest kid, and up until that point I took everything my teachers told me literally. "This is how you learn" and everything felt like pushing boulders up a hill. Once I had 'permission' to build my own mental models from the examples provided by the teacher and dismiss their suggestions for how to organize the information... they could barely talk fast enough for my liking.
These 'models' I would discover later were very like the scientific method. Rote memorization was my absolute nemesis. Hypothesis, attack, defend, revise, repeat. As an adult, people who noticed this about me have asked, "Hey hinkley, I need these people to do <task you've never done before>, can you keep an eye on them?" After the initial panic, within a couple minutes of peppering them with seemingly random questions I can often answer, "sure", and have a sense of what questions I can run through the ersatz model, even go a bit off script, and which ones really require me to interrupt the expert.
When I'm entirely wrong, it's back to pushing boulders uphill again. The ones I remember clearly though are the ones where I was truly awful but motivated to trudge through. If giving myself permission to be a polymath is the best thing I've ever done for myself, giving myself permission to be bad at something for a long time is the second best thing. If I get to the end of my life and find that these turn out to be the things I was best at teaching to others, I won't be surprised at all. "An expert is someone who has made every possible mistake in a narrow field of study." Nothing seems to get me repeat customers like being able to tell someone I came to the same conclusion, and here's a counter example and a better way to think about that problem.
It can be a trap. I knew a guy in college, “Kevin” who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time. He was doing much better than people like me who could pick things up and be an expert beginner in hours or days, because most of us never worked anywhere near that hard for anything in our lives. I had worked that hard for exactly one thing at this point, which put me at a vantage point of being able to see both groups. None of my other peers really understood Kevin. I confess I didn’t always either.
If you can fill your days with things that you are “talented” at, you never get around to the things that are hard but make you a better person or for a richer life. You can justify quitting before you ever start, and only later figure out that “compensating qualities” simply don’t. Not all the time. Especially in a crisis.
Today a couple of the things that people think I’m talented at, I simply believe are possible when everyone else has given up. The Talent, if there is one, is a better sense of possibility, and a belief that at least a few people could figure things out if they could be arsed to do so. If there’s a second Talent, it’s in figuring out that not only are people fundamentally the same, century after century, but in many cases so are the problems they struggle with. Much like there is some underlying quality of NP-complete problems that makes them interchangeable. Solving problems is itself a thing you can study, and it can make you “talented” in whatever you care to be arsed to try.